TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 8 April 2013

by TidBITS Staff

Snapz Pro X 2.5.2 -- Ambrosia has released Snapz Pro X 2.5.2 to fix an issue with accurately capturing the precise pixels of a selection and bring back support for several styles of image borders (which was excised in version 2.5). The update also improves the reliability of movie encoding, improves compatibility with both OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Retina displays, and adds Chinese and Russian localizations. ($69 new, free update, 15.8 MB, release notes)

BBEdit 10.5.3 -- Offering a veritable festival of fixes, Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 10.5.3 with over 50 bugs squashed (many of them also found in version 4.5.1 of the free general-purpose text editor TextWrangler). Most amusing is this release note:

The display glyph for invisible spaces (when “Show Invisible” and “Show Spaces” are both turned on) is now U+00B7 (MIDDLE DOT). If spaces don’t display when those settings are turned on, then your display font is missing that glyph, and you should report it to your font’s developer as a bug. (I would have used U+1427 (CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL MIDDLE DOT) for the humour value alone, but not enough fonts supported that glyph. Sorry.)

Amongst the other fixes that are exclusive to BBEdit 10.5.3, this update once again looks for URLs in plain text dragged into project lists to aid in the addition of remote file references from FTP apps, ensures that the Close All in Project command now works for instaprojects, fixes a crash that occurred when attempting to Convert to XML (under Markup > Tidy), ensures that relative path references in HTML and CSS documents are correctly resolved, and fixes a performance bug where the Functions floater would impose a “heavy penalty” in conjunction with a source file that contained a large number of function entries. ($49.99 new from Bare Bones or the Mac App
Store, free update, 12.5 MB, release notes)

TextWrangler 4.5.1 -- Bare Bones Software has also released TextWrangler 4.5.1, mirroring the bulk of the fixes found in the simultaneously released BBEdit 10.5.3 — TextWrangler’s more powerful (and non-free) sibling. Among the highlights, the general-purpose text editor fixes an issue where the Text Encoding pop-up menu in the Save dialog didn’t reflect the current encoding setting; squashes a bug that used excessive memory and would crash the app when opening large, complicated files; reduces the amount of time displaying startup progress; fixes a bug that caused Show Hidden Items in the Open dialog to
be ignored; and corrects some artwork for enhanced viewing on Retina displays. (Free from Bare Bones Software and the Mac App Store, 9.6 MB, release notes)